The Marlowsphere Blog (#133)

There we were in the second half of the 20^th century, having experienced the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan that ended WWII, and watched in the late 1970s a pivot towards the west by Communist China following the 1976 demise of dictator Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), and in 1989 even as we watched the horror of Tiananmen Square, we also watched the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We saw the creation of the European Union, the death of South African Apartheid, the shrinkage of nuclear weapons on a worldwide scale, the expansion of democracies, the diminution of illiteracy to about 15% of the world’s population, and the increase of global trade, so-called globalism.

We also saw a further exploration of space and the rise of a few non-governmental organizations investing in the exploration of space. The Higgs Boson, the so-called “god particle” was confirmed and the “repaired” Hubble Telescope peered closer and closer into the origins of this universe. The future of generations to come appeared to be bright.

But here we are in 2016 and the reverse appears to be true. In 2001, on 9/11, Al Qaeda terrorists took over two commercial airplanes and destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City (this wasn’t their first attempt). There are now terrorist groups in Africa, e.g., Boko Haram, and in Russia, and in the Philippines, and in France, and in Belgium, among others. It has taken over eight years for the United States and other contingent countries to recover from the “mortgage crisis of 2008.” Britain has just voted to leave the European Union, the so-called “Brexit,” and in the United States the upcoming national election pits a politician, Hillary Clinton, with decades of regional, national and international experience, against an entertainer, real estate magnate Donald Trump, who has decades of experience on reality television. His vision of the future is to retreat from it by building walls between the United States and Mexico, to undo our trade agreements with other countries, and to (possibly) use nuclear weapons against our enemies (whomever they might be).

Elsewhere in the world, terrorists’ attacks have governments and peoples nervous about open borders and immigration issues resulting in the loss of jobs in one place only to turn up for less pay in other places. Local and regional wars have made millions of people homeless. The disparity between the so-called 1% (the haves) and the rest of the world (the have nots) grows deeper with every year. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is getting screwed.

Further, the Internet is not creating a level playing field. It is allowing those with the technical know-how and marketing imagination to create platforms wherein users create content for free and the owners of the servers housing the platform very rich.

It is a gross irony that while some countries, like the United States, parts of the European Union, Japan, and China are exploring space both within and without our solar system, several tribal cultures, such ISIS and the Taliban, are more concerned with what women should wear in public, women’s subservient role in their society, and a strict adherence to the word of Allah. Also, in the Middle East extremist Jews and extremist Palestinians are at war over who should own what territory. In Saudi Arabia, despite their ostensible acceptance of western trade, there is an adherence to an anachronistic extreme form of Islam, so-called Wahhabism. The so-called Kingdom funds this form of Islam with millions of dollars and proselytize their point of view wherever possible.

And in the United States, the chasm between predominantly white police forces and young mostly unarmed African-Americans appears to have exploded into the headlines and into television and radio news broadcasts in the last several years. The Civil Rights Acts were passed decades ago, but the blatant racism expressed by the shooting of unarmed black males by white police officers appears to have become a common occurrence, even in the historical context of an African-American president in the White House.

Q: Is America, is the world retreating from what seemed to be a        brighter future a generation ago?
A: Yes, it is. Or that’s the way it seems.

My view is that the world is experiencing a period of retreat from the future into a period of tribalism. And it is not recent. It has been building for some time, perhaps ever since the commercial introduction of the telegraph in 1844. This was the world’s first electronic communications medium that could transmit information from one point to another at the speed of light. In the mid-20^thcentury photonic technologies were introduced (these are technologies based on photons as opposed to electrons). These combined technologies have bumped up the speed of communication and transport of goods and services and with them cultural values on a global basis. Cultures around the world where the literacy rate is lower and much lower than it is in more developed nations are repulsed by this invasion of outside cultural values. It is anathema to their entrenched cultural values. And, in turn, we are repulsed by their reactions, such as when we hear about honor killings in remote parts of India, and the mutilation of female genitalia in parts of Africa.

Even in places that are so-called developed nations there is a retreat into tribalism. The Brexit vote is one example, the rise of neo-fascism in Germany, and the increasing rejection of Islamic leaning peoples in France are other examples. It is a retreat borne out of deep fear—a fear that one’s family and community values are being tested, challenged, upended, and revealed as untrue or unfounded.

People don’t want change even when it is beneficial in the long-run to the greater whole. The speed of light technologies that now are increasingly circling the planet have thrown opposing cultural values into the same economic pot and have created such fear among the members of opposing tribes that it is engendering violence.

And this phase of planetary cultural evolution will not go away quickly. It will be with us for a while, perhaps a generation of two. Until peoples of different cultural stripes begin to accept that the future is about the integration of cultural values, even the loss and rejection of some values—such as religious and political beliefs—there will be a retreat from the future. Accepting that change is the constant, that change is the way of the universe, a universe we are just beginning to learn about, is a deeply painful process.

This view parallels the structure of scientific revolutions. First, there is rejection of facts that contravene the prevailing view, then there is anger and battles over what is true and what is not true, then ultimate acceptance of the new factual context. We are looking at a generation or two of battles over what is true and what is not true. If world history is any arbiter, progress will prevail, but only after many more have died for their antiquated beliefs and many more have died defending the values of the future.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 5, 2016

© Eugene Marlow 2016

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The Marlowsphere Blog (#130)

[Over time] Man’s communications technologies . . . have moved from the verbal, to the alphabetic, to the typographic, to the filmic, and to the electronic . . . , [I]t would be absurd to presume that “electronic” is the end of the. . .technology chain. . . .The next significant [and dominant] medium will be based in some form of light.

I wrote the above in 1990. They appear on page 155 of Shifting Time and Space: The Story of Videotape published by Praeger in 1991 (Eugene Secunda, Ph.D., was co-author).

Since the publication of this book, I have evolved a paradigm of the invisible affect of dominant media that posits, in part, that photonic technologies—first developed in the 1960s—have emerged as the dominant technology in the latter half of the 20^thcentury and the early part of the 21^st century and are slowly but surely combining with or supplanting electronic based technologies. In turn, I posit that in no small measure this emergence accelerated the advent of “globalism,” and this has resulted in the re-emergence of “tribalism,” this time on a planetary scale with several attendant challenges.

“Globalism” is defined as:

1. A national geopolitical policy in which the entire world is regarded as the appropriate sphere for a state’s influence.
2. The development of social, cultural, technological, or economic networks that transcend national boundaries.

A “Tribe” can be defined as:

1. A unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.

“Tribalism” is defined as:

1.  the organization, culture, or beliefs of a tribe.
2. a strong feeling of identity with and loyalty to one’s tribe or group

Clearly, globalism is in sharp contrast to tribalism. The former takes on the whole world contextually, whereas, the latter refers to a much smaller grouping.

In 1844 A.D. Samuel F.B. Morse commercially introduced the telegraph, launching the so-called “electronic age.” It is my contention that a little more than a 100 years after the birth of the electronic age and shortly after World War II we entered yet another “age” in Homo Sapiens’ technological evolution; this one based not on electrons, but on photons. To put it another way, we have already entered the age of “light” or what I am calling “the photonic age.”

Photonics is the science of light (photon) generation, detection, and manipulation through emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and detection/sensing. The term photonics developed as an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s and optical fibers developed in the 1970s.

The use of “light” technology has spread “silently” into various aspects of society. And as Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill 1964), has stated: “Once a new technology comes into a social milieu, it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated.” This is true of orality, early writing, typography, electronics, and now photonics.

The evidence that we are now living in an age of photonics is all around us. One can find photonic technologies in a broad spectrum of human activity: 

• Consumer equipment: barcode scanner, printer, CD/DVD/Blu-ray devices, remote control devices
• Telecommunications: optical fiber communications, optical down converter to microwave
• Medicine: correction of poor eyesight, laser surgery, surgical endoscopy, tattoo removal
• Industrial manufacturing: the use of lasers for welding, drilling, cutting, and various methods of surface modification
• Construction: laser leveling, laser range-finding, smart structures
• Aviation: photonic gyroscopes lacking mobile parts
• Military: IR sensors, command and control, navigation, search and rescue, mine laying and detection
• Entertainment: laser shows, beam effects, holographic art
• Metrology: time and frequency measurements, range-finding
• Photonic computing: clock distribution and communication between computers, printed circuit boards, or within optoelectronic integrated circuits; in the future: quantum computing

And many of these photonic technologies are not only becoming more present, they are also replacing older, more familiar technologies.

The National Academy of Engineering has pointed out:

“From surgical instruments and precision guides in construction to bar code scanners and compact disc readers, lasers are integral to many aspects of modern life and work. But perhaps the farthest-flung contribution of the 20th century’s combination of optics and electronics has been in telecommunications. With the advent of highly transparent fiber-optic cable in the 1970s, very high-frequency laser signals now carry phenomenal loads of telephone conversations and data across the country and around the world.”

George Basalla, professor of the history of technology at the University of Delaware, cogently points out in his book The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge History of Science Series, 1988), all technologies have antecedents. In other words, they do not just appear, like mice via spontaneous generation in straw as those in the Middle Ages surmised.

Similarly, photonic or laser technologies did not just appear in the mid-1950s. In 1917 Albert Einstein proposed the theory of stimulated emission—that is, if an atom in a high-energy state is stimulated by a photon of the right wavelength, another photon of the same wavelength and direction of travel will be created. Stimulated emission forms the basis for research into harnessing photons to amplify the energy of light.

Leaping forward over 90 years, in 1997 the Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) became the longest single-cable network in the world and provides infrastructure for the next generation of Internet applications. The 17,500-mile cable begins in England and runs through the Strait of Gibraltar to Palermo, Sicily, before crossing the Mediterranean to Egypt. It then goes overland to the FLAG operations center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, before crossing the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and Andaman Sea; through Thailand; and across the South China Sea to Hong Kong and Japan. (Copyright © 2009 by National Academy of Engineering).

What are the effects?

To quote Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration (Huffpost, “The Blog,” 5/26/2014):

We are witnessing a reversion to tribalism around the world, away from nation states. The same pattern can be seen even in America–especially in American politics. . . .

Over the last several decades, though, technology has whittled away the underpinnings of the nation state. National economies have become so intertwined that economic security depends less on national armies than on financial transactions around the world. . . .

News and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker’s garage.

The nation state, meanwhile, is coming apart. A single Europe–which seemed within reach a few years ago — is now succumbing to the centrifugal forces of its different languages and cultures. The Soviet Union is gone, replaced by nations split along tribal lines. Vladimir Putin can’t easily annex the whole of Ukraine, only the Russian-speaking part. The Balkans have been Balkanized.

Separatist movements have broken out all over—Czechs separating from Slovaks; Kurds wanting to separate from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; even the Scots seeking separation from England.

The turmoil now consuming much of the Middle East stems less from democratic movements trying to topple dictatorships than from ancient tribal conflicts between the two major denominations of Islam—Sunni and Shia.

To this list we can add: the Catalonians have long wanted to separate from Spain.

When early writing systems appeared in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East around 5,000 years ago the inhabitants there did not all of a sudden observe “Hmmm, we’re not just an oral-only society anymore. We’ve entered the age of early writing.” In the early 21^st century, however, with global literacy at an all-time high of around 85%, we have the benefit of much hindsight. We have also had the benefit of such media scholars as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, et al. Their collective scholarship provides the intellectual foundation for looking at the world with a wide view.

It is from this perspective that I conclude we have entered a new “technological” age—the age of photonics. Photonics have accelerated the evolution of “globalism” and has resulted in an equal and opposite response: “tribalism.” As the speed of information has accelerated, and corporate entities have fostered homogeneity on a global scale, people have retreated into their tribal cultures to regain some semblance of unique identity.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
October 12, 2015

© Eugene Marlow 2015

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The Marlowsphere Blog (#107)

Mankind’s communications technology history can be divided into four mega stages: oral communications; written, then printed communications; electronic communications; and most recently communications based on photonic technologies.

Oral Communications

The initial stage of man’s evolution as a communicating species is the age of oral communications. This age has lasted, of course, until the present day. All of our electronic and photonic devices notwithstanding, we still use orality to communicate. But it should not be taken for granted that orality has been extant since man’s antecedents walked out of Africa and began to populate the world. As Robbins Burling, author of The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved (Oxford University Press, 2005), points out, man’s development of language as a means of communication beyond body language and cries and calls probably took a period of a couple of million years to evolve, beginning with physiological changes to the position of the voicebox in relation to the tongue and mouth. In effect, language is a success story that did not happen overnight.

This age can be symbolized by a circle. Why? Because in the age of oral communication it all took place in a face-to-face context. In a tribal context, imagine the old man of the tribe sitting around the campfire in a circle telling the stories, the news of tribe. Everyone in earshot was at that moment part of the tribe. The record or history of the tribe was verbal. It radiated from the speaker. Everyone who was around to hear the speaker received the message directly from the storyteller. Hence the circular symbol. 
 
The Age of Writing and Print
 
Tribal history and record keeping moved from the ear to the eyes with the development of visual symbols, for example, primeval Chinese ku-wan–gesture pictures. These pictures preceded pictographs, the picture symbols that first appeared in Western Asia. Native American tribes notched or painted sticks to convey messages. In South America, Incas knotted colored quipu cords to keep complex records.  Notice that all these last approaches have an element of portability.

About 10,000 years ago, in 8,000 BC in Sumer in the so-called Fertile Crescent, particularly Mesopotamia, small clay triangles, spheres, cones and other tokens were molded to represent sheep, measures of grain, jars of oil and other trading goods. Around 3,100 BC the Sumerians invented numerals, thus separating the symbols for sheep from the number of sheep. This was perhaps the first digital (as opposed to analogic, as in orality) technology.

Fast forward a few millennia to somewhere between 1,100 and 800 B.C. when the Greeks added vowel sounds and both expanded and contracted the antecedent Phoenician alphabet to create the unique alphabet we use today. This alphabet became the standard for writing in the Western world. I use the word standard advisedly: standardization along with portability are the two central prerequisites for the ubiquitous adoption of a new technology.
 
Before there was printing, there was copying by hand. Before copying by hand, there was paper. The invention of paper in China is credited to a eunuch, Ts’ai Lun, the emperor’s minister of public works, in 105 A.D. .

In the eleventh century, one Pi Sheng, a [Chinese] blacksmith and alchemist, invented movable type, molding characters out of baked clay–pottery type that he placed in an iron frame. He made several copies of each word character and 20 or more of the most common words so he could print a whole page at once. Unfortunately, success eluded Pi Sheng. No ink behaved well with pottery type and the sheer volume of Chinese word characters (today there are about 40,000) worked against his medium of poetry type, so it was easier just to engrave wooden blocks.

It was printer Johnannes Gutenberg, in the mid-1400s, in Mainz, Germany, who produced a printing system using movable type. Most obvious among its elements were controlled, exact dimensions of alphabet type cast from metal punches made of hardened steel. These were not unlike the dies, stamps, and punches that were well known to European leather workers, metal-smiths, and pewter makers.

In 1451 Gutenberg used a press to print an old German poem. In 1453 he prints a 42-line per page Bible. By 1490 the printing of books on paper (rather than parchment) becomes more common in Europe. By 1500 approximately 35,000 books have been printed, some 10 million copies.

Note again that fundamental to the success of the printing press is the characteristic of standardization. The portability factor comes into play with respect to the product–the thousands of books that contained history, records, and ideas that could be easily transported from one place to another.

Writing and printing: lines on paper, read from left to right in Western cultures, right to left in Middle Eastern cultures, and down and up in Far Eastern cultures, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. Linear and orderly. From a communications model point of view, writing and printing evolved what has become known as a militaristic or bureaucratic model symbolized by a triangle, or, if you prefer, a pyramid.

Writing and printing evolved hierarchical societies: the top of the hierarchy (primarily those who could read and write) told the folks in the middle of the hierarchy what to do. They, in turn, told the rest of the society (primarily those who could not read and write) what to do.

This form of societal organization–militaristic, bureaucratic, industrial and manufacturing oriented–existed intact from the time of the great Pharaohs to the middle of the 20th century. The symbol of this kind of society–the pyramid–can be viewed as imposed on the circular symbol that represents the antecedent oral society.

The Electronic Age

The more recent communications technology stage is the electronic age, symbolized by an amoeba-like pyramid. Imagine this symbol superimposed on the top of the pyramid, on top of the circle. All three co-exist today.

The electronic age was born in 1838–a mere 176 years ago. Early in that year Samuel Finley Breese Morse—artist, daguerrotypist, a so-called “American Leonardo”–gave a series of public demonstrations of the first practical electromagnetic telegraph. In 1844, after receiving a thirty-thousand dollar grant to construct a telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C. the year before, Morse finally opened the nation’s first commercial telegraph line on May 24 with the now famous query “What hath God wrought?”  On that day the electronic communications age was born. On that day, the message was separated from the messenger at the speed of light.

Then came Thomas Edison, himself a master telegrapher, also inventor of the electronic light bulb and many other electrical devices that have contributed to our speed of light culture. About the same time, the telephone was invented.

The basis for modern network broadcasting was created in the United States by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T). In 1922, AT&T opened radio station WEAF in New York. Soon thereafter broadcast radio became a dominant mass medium in the United States with many people and families listening to the radio in groups to electronic reporters.

In 1939 at the World’s Fair in New York, broadcast television was introduced to the American public. At the time it was called “Radio with Pictures.” Soon broadcast television became the dominant mass medium, especially for news. In time, network television became the medium of choice for primetime.

But in the 1950s came cable television. And today several local and regional cable outlets have developed news channels, such as NY1 in New York City.  Broadcast news channels have become just another number on the cable box.

In between these developments in radio and broadcast and cable television, satellites were developed. Actually it was in the mid-1940s that Arthur C. Clark, the author of 2001 A Space Odyssey first proposed the idea. Satellites not only expanded the broadcast television world, and helped launch the pay cable network business, it also gave birth to business teleconferencing, which lead, in turn, to the advent of satellite media tours.

Computers, of course, and computer networks are the communications media of the 1990s-present. Even though the first mainframes were developed in the mid-1940s, today computers in the form of personal computers give new meaning to the phrase “information access.”

All of these electronic technologies are merging into what we call today the Internet and the World Wide Web.

In sum, between 1838 and now a cornucopia of electronic media have been created to reach a variety of audiences on a local, regional, national, and now global scale.

The Photonic Age

It should be obvious that the electronic age is not the end all, be all of man’s communication technology evolution. I propose we have already entered the next stage in the history of communications technology: the age of photonics, or the age of light.

What is photonics? Photonics is “The technology of generating and harnessing light and other forms of radiant energy whose quantum unit is the photon. The range of applications of photonic extends from energy generation to detection to communications and information processing.”

You are already familiar with some photonic devices: fiber optics for telecommunications, supermarket checkout scanners, CD-ROMs, lasers in medicine, lasers in military weaponry. Of course, in science fiction there are many more photonic applications: phasers and non-invasive surgery tools.
 
Apart from the fact that more and more technologies are increasingly using photonic applications, there are other clues that we are at the early stages of a new communications technology era.

It can be said that the work of artists are precursors to emerging trends. For me, the clue to the emergence of the age of light comes from Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” When you watch this film one of the things that should become apparent is that it is all about light: shades of light, use and misuse of light, shedding light on the truth, lighting up the sky, reaching for the light, and the light within.  |

It has become an accepted truth that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Yet some films presage just the opposite. And keep in mind that one of the first movies ever made at the turn of the 20^th century presaged a trip to the moon, almost 70 years before it actually happened!

All in all, it needs to be pointed out that while it took a couple of million years for man to communicate via spoken language, it has only taken about 12,000 years for the species to move from an agricultural-dominant culture, to writing, then printing, to electronic media, and now photonic communications media.

More on this subject in the next blog.

Please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com if you have any comments on this or any other of my blogs.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 15, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

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The Marlowsphere Blog (#106)

My last blog posited that we are moving in the direction of humanizing technology. That is, increasingly our communications systems in particular—the Internet, World Wide Web, telecommunications—are morphing into very human-like sensory characteristics, for example, increasing voice characteristics, increasing use of motion video on the Internet. In homes, businesses, and public spaces video screens have become flat (some are curved), and large.

I also posited that our communications systems have created a global marketplace for information and communications. We have inexorably become what Dr. Marshall McLuhan   described in1964 as a “global village.” His use of those two words is correct. The planet has become global with respect to all manner of human activities. In one sense we have moved from villages, to city-states, to countries, and in the last century to regional economic entities, e.g., the Pacific Rim, the European Union, OPEC, the Organization of American States, the BRICS, and so on.

But the phrase also reflects the characteristics of a village of the past: people in the village are an entity unto themselves, sometimes dealing with outsiders, sometimes not, where men are dominant, and women are secondary. In today’s world the concept of a “village” is reflected in the fact that most if not all the new countries that have been admitted to the United Nations are based on “ethnic centers,” never mind geographic considerations. Further, current conflicts in the world are ethnically-based—that is, there are groups at war with each other based on perceived cultural differences. It is not about territory, especially, or even economic gain. It’s an extremist view—“we perceive who we are and if you’re not one of us, you must be killed.”

It is ironic that for all the technological advances in communications and the collaboration it fosters, there seems to be more groups coming into existence who are insular, exclusive and extremist.

Examples abound. The current Israel-Palestinian conflict in Gaza is about Hamas wanting to destroy Israel; it refuses to recognize Israel as a legitimate state.  On the other hand, Israel exacerbates the perceptions by continuing to build settlements on land the Palestinians regard as theirs. They also perceive that the entire region is theirs, but the United Nations   in 1948 voted otherwise. There has been conflict ever since. The conflict is exacerbated by Iran that is apparently supplying rockets to Hamas. Iran seems also bent on finding a way to destroy Israel.

In Iraq ISIS believes its Sharia interpretation of Islam is the only interpretation of the Koran and in that context feels no constraint in executing people who do not believe as they do and blowing things up—such as the resting place of the biblical Joseph.

In Syria newly elected (for the third time) President Assad thinks nothing of killing his own people who disagree with his self-centered, elitist policies. In Egypt the former, now deposed President Morsi thought nothing of inculcating his Brotherhood of Islam’s narrow-focused perception of the world. An ex-military general is now the new president. We’ll see how that works out.

In Africa, the Boko Haram, led by a man who was once interred in a mental institution, believe that everything in the west is bad. It thinks nothing of killing and kidnapping in the name of Islam.

In eastern Ukraine recently, Russian President Putin thought nothing of seizing the Crimean Peninsula and annexing it to Russia. He also supports the “Ukrainian militants” who similar to the abovementioned extremists think nothing of seizing buildings and killing those who do not feel the way they do about Russia.

In Chechnya rebels there continue to blow things up—including people—because they want a separate state based on their cultural heritage. The war in Bosnia at the end of the last century was also ethnically-based. Many died because each side saw their cultural heritage as the culture to follow. Ethnic cleansing followed.

Adolf Hitler used his Nazi propaganda machine to manipulate much of the German populace into perceiving that the Jews were at the root of their problems and that Jews were less than human. Starting with Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938, the Third Reich succeeded in exterminating six million Jews.

In China towards the end of Mao Zedong’s rule, the Cultural Revolution purged a generation of intellectuals and artists who were perceived as out of step with Mao’s dictates. Millions perished.

In the 16^th century the Spanish Armada attacked England. Why? Because Spain was Catholic and Elizabeth I wasn’t.  The Armada famously perished in the English Channel from a storm that came up just at the right moment.

Go back a millennia and you have the Crusades that pitted the righteousness of Christians against the righteousness of Muslim-based cultures. Go back another thousand years and you have the righteousness of the Roman Empire against the emergent righteous Christians, and so on.

Conclusion: toleration of other people’s cultural values and views is not a prominent human characteristic. To bring us back to the present, former Secretary of State Madelaine Albright recently said: “In a sentence, the world is a mess.” The problem in the early part of the 21^st century is that the world means the world. Two thousand years ago the world was much smaller, but larger than the world of early agricultural communities of 10-12,000 years ago, and certainly much larger than the villages of pre-literate tribes before that.

The problem is conflicting cultural ethnic values and views are now supported and accelerated by contemporary transportation, information, and communications technologies. Information (whether factual or not) moves at the speed of light and this only expands its impact.

So, why hasn’t contemporary transportation, information, and communication technologies made the world a better place for all of us to enjoy? Why haven’t these technologies made us different? Why are human beings bent on pursuing conflict rather than peaceful co-existence?

Perhaps part of the answer is that human evolution takes a lot longer than technological development. After all, it took a couple of million years for homo sapiens to develop the capacity for language, but only a few thousand years to move from an agricultural world, to a world with accounting, then writing, then printing, then electronics, and now photonic and nano technologies.

We’ll probably have men and women living on planet Mars sooner than men and women will learn that cooperation and collaboration is more fruitful than armed conflict.

Please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com if you have any comments on this or any other of my blogs.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 1, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

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The Internet and the World Wide Web are confirming examples that homo sapiens, as a tool-making species, is slowly but inexorably in the process of replicating themselves—that is, externalizing their senses to the point–perhaps some two hundred years down the road–where the highly sophisticated Star Trek, The Next Generation character D.A.T.A. may actually become a reality.

Moreover, every step man takes technologically he further extends his senses—into the microcosmic, across the planet, into space. In effect, over the eons we have taken quantum leaps from the non-literate old man sitting around the campfire telling the stories of the tribe face-to-face with the members of the tribe, to the current manifestation of technology where the tribe is global (Marshal McLuhan’s so-called “global village”) and the community of man is global.

Yet, we are going in two directions simultaneously. In the face of global communications, time and time again marketing, advertising and organizational communications subject experts I have interviewed talk about one-on-one marketing, one-on-one customer contact, a one-on-one relationship with an individual anywhere on the planet with access to a computer, a modem, and an Internet hookup. This expression of the Internet experience reflects the steps in technology we have taken which bring us that much closer to the full externalization of human characteristics and behavior. Everything about the Internet and the World Wide Web is taking us further in the direction of a replication of the human, face-to-face experience.

Our current electronic/photonic technologies began with the development of the first speed of light technology—the telegraph—in 1838. Since then we have been moving towards the externalization of our senses on a global scale. The Internet and the World Wide Web are a confluence of previous electronic technologies: the telephone, television, telecommunications, video, audio, radio, text, computer graphics, film, computers, and micro-processors. But the Internet and the World Wide Web are not de-humanizing media. On the contrary, they enhance humanity’s ability to communicate. We are in the process of creating new communities around the world on a macrocosmic scale and on a microcosmic scale in regional and local communities.

Internet developments support the view that this technology is pushing the “humanization” of media. In other words, the Internet will increasingly act like a person. For example, the Internet will take on more of a “voice,” such as “You’ve got mail.” A study several years ago by Killen & Associates, Internet Voice: Opportunities and Threats forecast that global voice/Internet services revenues will top $63 billion by the year 2002 from $741 million in 1997. Further, approximately 48% of the 2002 revenues will be generated in North America while 33% will come from Europe. The bad news for carriers is that the revenues generated by voice/Internet traffic will mostly supplant old telephone service revenues, according to the study. Today, increasing numbers of households have given up the old landline technology in favor of the moble phone.

From the user’s perspective, the Net will become more alive, more interactive, more conversational, more personal, more individualized, more human-like.

Many technological antecedents to the humanization continuum are already in place: robotics, miniaturization, mechanical hearts, man-made materials to replace bones and skin, limb prosthetics, faster, smaller, smarter computers.

Take a look at your computer. If you have stereo speakers, imagine the speakers as ears, the computer monitor a face, the keyboard a mouth, the CPU a brain (although in this case it is separate from the face). Imagine, then, that this crude head is mounted on top of a highly sophisticated robotic device with the ability to move.

Technological mobility is an eventuality. Two central factors pervade the adoption of a new technology: standardization and mobility. Examples abound. When the Greeks standardized the alphabet it also became de facto mobile. Same is true of printing, photography, radio, television, video, telecommunications. All these technologies are mobile. And now—with laptops and smartphones of all types—so are computers. A laptop is just several steps away from evolving into a mobile, robotic brain.

In 1997 researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), in Oak Ridge, Tennessee developed a half living, half silicon chip dubbed “Critters on a Chip.” This integrated circuit consists of living sensors—such as bioluminescent bacteria placed on a standard integrated circuit, or chip. Officials at ORNL have boasted that the chip is small, inexpensive and provides information quickly: “This new development using an integrated chip‑based approach with living organisms could dramatically advance the ability to sense a variety of chemical agents in the environment, such as chemical warfare agents or other toxic substances and things like environmental estrogens that could have detrimental effects on living systems. . . .If it is indeed possible to manufacture these part-electronic and part-biological systems as a small, inexpensive chip, it would dramatically improve the ability to monitor many different types of environments.” (from Michael McPherson, Editor & Publisher, SCCM e‑zine, Social & Charitable Cause Marketing, sccm@netrax.net, PRFORUM LISTSERV, April 18, 1997).

It is possible. Materials scientist John Rogers and his team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed materials for use inside the human body that are called “tran-science.” This is technology that is born to die, such as sensors that track blood pressure in the aorta after heart surgery, then dissolve once a patient is out of the woods. They have also made eyeball-shaped cameras that mimic human and insect sight, and soft threads of tiny LEDs that can be injected right into the brain. (See Smithsonian Magazine, December 2013).

In parallel to these technological developments, the Internet and other electronic media are actually fostering more human, face-to-face contact. These media do not separate people. They bring them together. If this were not so, why then has travel around the world expanded? It is not just growth in business travel, it is also people visiting other people on a global scale. I concur with John Naisbitt’s “High tech, high touch” postulate—that as we increase our level of high technology, there is a similar response in the human realm; that as we use more high technology to communicate, as human beings we develop an increased need to “press the flesh,” even if that flesh is at a distance.

In Global Paradox (Avon Books, New York, 1994) Naisbitt made the case that travel is one of the world’s biggest industries, not energy, manufacturing, electronics, or agriculture. As of a couple of years ago, tourism and travel employed 98 million+ people.

As we continue to expand our ability to reach individuals and mass audiences at great distances, we are also becoming more consumed with local and regional issues, sometimes to the detriment of national and global concerns. Simultaneously, there has been an explosion of human interaction on a global scale, as the trends in travel indicate. There are also more arts and sports events. And observe the greater interest in special events, conferences, and conventions. While some social critics might observe that gathering at a sports event is not socializing, it does indicate man’s drive to commune in some form.

This gathering of tribes on a global scale has caused other ramifications as well as clashes. First, English has become the de facto language of business in the world. In the last several dacades alone, approximately half of the world’s languages have simply vanished. Meanwhile, English becomes more and more the global language of commerce, not just because the United States remains one of the world’s economic superpowers, but because, as the most hybrid of all major languages, English has the greatest capacity to absorb and fuse the useful remnants of dying tongues. Thus, if you’re going into any kind of business, your strategic use of the English language—both written and oral—needs to be very strong.

Second, very generally speaking, according to Edward T. Hall, author of Beyond Culture (New York: Anchor Publishing, 1976) there are two kinds of cultures in the world with variations in between: low context and high context. High context cultures are more sensitive to the surrounding circumstances or context of an event. This is apparent in communication in which non-verbal cues play a significant role in the interaction. Although no culture exists exclusively at either end of the context scale, some cultures, such as the Asian, Hispanic, and African-American are high-context; others, such as Northern European and American, are low-context. When east meets west, the communication can be a challenge, whether on foreign or domestic soil.

For professionals in all fields the evolving media environment requires both media studies and human studies. It is qualitative and quantitative. It requires strong written and oral communications skills. It requires technological skills and people skills. It requires a broad view of the world, but with an eye on the details in one’s own backyard.

Please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com if you have any comments on this or any other of my blogs.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
August 11, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

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